900 Dutch Citizens Get to Wreck the Netherlands’ Energy Economy

A court has ruled on behalf of complaining Dutch citizens that all carbon emissions in the Netherlands must decrease 25% by 2020.

According to Newser.com, “The ruling by The Hague District Court could lay the foundations for similar cases around the world.” The case was a lawsuit brought in the name of nine hundred Dutch citizens. That verdict is quite scary if the decision is allowed to stand and gets enforced. We are going to see the Netherlands become a much poorer country as suddenly all the Dutch begin paying more for energy that could be available to them more cheaply. If this is, as the Newser.com headline threatens (“This Dutch Ruling Could Have Global Repercussions”), followed by other countries, then we are going to see an increase in poverty all over the Western World (India and China, of course, will have nothing to do with this kind of economic suicide).

But to have several Western countries suddenly forced to spend more money on energy is going to have negative effects on the American economy as well. People who are struggling to afford their energy are not likely to purchase as many exports.

(Of course there will be winners as well. People who are invested in so-called “green energy” may just have had the value of their portfolios boosted a bit. If this happened as those companies were meeting real needs, that would be a good thing. But this value comes from simply arbitrarily taking away the ability to use cheaper energy and imposing a mandate to use more expensive energy.)

Dutch government lawyers swiftly left the courtroom after the judgment and could not immediately be reached for comment. The court said, based on current government climate policy, the Netherlands will cut its emissions by only 17% by 2020, compared with benchmark 1990 levels. The Dutch government can appeal the ruling to a higher court. It remains unclear exactly how the court can enforce its ruling. It has the power to impose fines for failure to carry out its orders, but never uses such powers against the government and Urgenda, the group that filed the case, did not request such a move, said judge Peter Blok. What one Urgenda worker had to say after Judge Hans Hofhuis read the ruling: “A courageous judge. This is fantastic. This is for my children and grandchildren.”

What is bizarre about this is how disproportionate the benefit is when compared to the damage the ruling does. If we assume the man-made global warming scam were true, then the contribution of the carbon coming from the Netherlands is minute. Global warming is, after all, global. All the carbon release in China and India also contributes to it, and I’m sure they produce much more carbon than the energy suppliers in the Netherlands produce. So the Dutch citizenry are about to see their standard of living go down and they will still have to deal with the consequences of the global warming they say that carbon emissions are causing. Yet the people who have just made life harder for their children and grandchildren are claiming that this decision was “courageous” and “fantastic.”